Model: Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 256GB Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics has been a leader in the electronics industry for more than 30 years. Since the introduction of their first television in 1970, this Korean company has grown to become one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers, offering everything from tiny semiconductors to large home appliances. Samsung is no stranger to the storage industry either. Along with an assortment of DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives, the company offers both hard drive and flash based storage solutions for the portable and desktop computer markets
Like many other manufacturers, Samsung has set its sights on the growing solid-state drive (SSD) market. This past fall, the company introduced two new drives, the SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro. Designed and built completely in-house, these two ultra-slim SSDs are powered by Samsung's own triple-core MDX controller and feature a SATA 6GB/s interface, specially-engineered wear-leveling and garbage collection algorithms and up to 512MB of cache. From here though, the similarities end. Where the SSD 840 is aimed at the cost conscious consumer, the high-performance SSD 840 Pro is equipped with Samsung's Toggle DDR2 NAND flash memory to deliver up to 540MB/s read and 520MB/s write speeds as well as a maximum of 100,000 IOPS.
When I reviewed the SSD 840 Pro back in February, I was impressed by its great, all around performance. Needless to say, when I had to purchase a few SSDs for a virtualization project at work I chose the 256GB version of the SSD 840 Pro. Before installing the drives though, I took them and ran some tests to see how well they performed in a RAID array. Keep reading to see what you can expect from a pair of SSD 840 Pros.
